With the technical developments of electronic devices, intelligent terminal apparatuses including a touch display screen have become more and more popular, which also support increasingly diversified functions. Convenient and fast information input performance of such terminal apparatuses can improve the efficiency of human-machine interaction, and facilitate good operations of these terminal apparatuses and various multimedia functions, thereby enhancing user experience.
As shown in FIG. 1, by utilizing a touch screen 110 of a terminal apparatus and a virtual keyboard 120 displayed on the touch screen 110, a user can input texts using any one of input methods configured in the terminal apparatus. Existing input methods are mainly based on point touch input, that is, a user needs to tap keys corresponding to the characters to be input on the virtual keyboard one by one, and the corresponding program of the input method determines candidate words according to the key values and tap order of the keys tapped by the user. If the user taps one or more keys by mistake, or taps one or more extra keys, or misses one or more keys, it is possible that the user cannot get the desired text and he/she needs to tap keys again for input. For example, if the user wants to input an English word “for”, the keys “f”, “o”, and “r” need to be input on the virtual keyboard 120 sequentially. If the user successively taps “f”, “i” and “r”, i.e., the user taps the key “i” adjacent to the key “o” by mistake, the obtained candidate word may more likely be “fire”, “first”, and so on. Or, if the user successively taps keys “f”, “o”, “u”, and “r”, i.e., the user taps an extra key “u” after tapping the key “o”, the obtained candidate word may more likely be “four”, “fourty” and so on. Under all such conditions, the user can hardly get the desired word “for”.
In view of the above, the existing point touch-based input methods rely on accurate user clicks on corresponding keys to guarantee the input accuracy and efficiency. However, most of the existing terminal apparatuses have a small sized touch screen, and the distances between keys on the virtual keyboard are thus relatively short, which results in a high chance for the occurrence of tapping errors when users perform input operations. Accordingly, the accuracy and efficiency of text input is affected. Further, the point touch-based input method requires the users to perform tapping and releasing operations for several times, which also causes negative effects on the input efficiency.